This article is part of the series Home Truths: Europe’s Housing Challenge. HELSINKI — Finland’s experiment in ending rough sleeping has caught the attention of policymakers for one reason: It’s working. Called Housing First, the Finnish model aggressively closed homeless shelters, calling them traps, and did not require participants battling addictions to recover before receiving keys to a home. “We used to think that people somehow needed to get sober in order to be able to live in a flat,” said Helsinki Mayor Jan Vapaavuori. “But then we turned that around: You need an apartment in order to get sober.” Vapaavuori is Finland’s former housing minister, a post he held when the Housing First model was first developed. Now his job is to implement it on the municipal level. Housing First’s biggest innovation is right in its name. The program is based on the comically simple idea that to end homelessness, give people homes. Amid a rising homeless crisis across Europe, Housing First, now a decade old, is credited with getting 1,345 people off the streets, a 35 percent reduction in homelessness in Helsinki between 2008 and 2015, according to a review by Y-Foundation, a Finnish housing NGO that is involved in… Read full this story
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